1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a text processing apparatus which represents the mutual relation, such as modification, under modification and the like, between words or phrases constituting a sentence in a diagram, and provides the structure of the sentence in a form capable of easily visually grasping the structure.
2. Description of the Related Art
Heretofore, as methods for representing the structure of a sentence by computer processing according to so-called kakariuke relation in Japanese grammar, such as the relation of modification and under modification, for example, between an adjective and an noun or between an adverb and a verb, and the relation between a subject and a predicate in the sentence, there exist, for example, a representation by a sentence-structure analysis tree as shown in FIG. 9, an S-type representation in LISP (list processing language), a representation by a semantic network, and the like.
However, all the above-described methods or representation and display have been made from the viewpoint of developers and researchers of sentence analysis programs, and hence it is not easy for general users who form a text to immediately grasp the meanings in each method.
Furthermore, in the above-described display methods of sentence structures, for example, relative to the kakariuke relation, the primary object is for expressing the relative relation thereof. Hence, the perspective of the distance between bunsetsus (a bunsetsu is a constitutional unit in a Japanese sentence which correspond to a word or a phrase) in the kakariuke relation with each other in a sentence, and the order of bunsetsus are not clearly reflected.
When the author of a text polishes the formed text, he reads the text paying attention if there are misspellings in the text, or if there are portions having vague meanings, portions difficult to understand, and the like.
In such a case, however, if the auther only reads a normal text, that is, one-dimensional word trains, he hardly notices the existence of vague portions capable of causing various interpretations. Particularly in the case of Japanese, since restriction in the word order in a sentence is relatively small, there often occur cases having problems in that a plurality of interpretations of the meaning of the sentence exist, or the meaning of the sentence is hard to understand, though grammatically correct, according to the word order of the formed sentence.
However, the author of the sentence often cannot recall other interpretations than the contents he intended to express, and hence cannot notice inconvenience which other readers may feel, by merely reading again the formed sentence.
Furthermore, when an output sentence of a machine translation system has problems as described above, the existence of the problems is often not noticed due to insufficiency in the language ability of the user of the apparatus.
For example, when the sentence " " is written in Japanese, the following two interpretations hold: that is, "A sister of Hanako who is playing in the park, is pretty"; and "Hanako's sister, who is playing in the park, is pretty". However, the author of the sentence often recalls the only one interpretation he intends to, for example, the interpretation based on the situation that "Hanako is playing in the park", and cannot notice the possibility that readers may interpret that "Hanako's sister is playing in the park", even after reading again the sentence.
Moreover, there is often a sentence the meaning of which is hard to understand, though various interpretations are not produced, because of complicated kakariuke relation. Also in such a case, the author seldom notices the fact by only looking at the sentence.